Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

In France there are, I think, less than one per cent of people who are too skinny.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

From the time I was a kid, I always knew something was going to happen to me. Didn’t know exactly what.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

The eyes like sentinel occupy the highest place in the body.

To this day, some of my closest friends say, ‚Gaga, you know, everything’s great. You’re a singer; your dreams have come true.‘ But, still, when certain things are said to you over and over again as you’re growing up, it stays with you and you wonder if they’re true.

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

I’m not really concerned with portraying this tough warrior – I mean, that’s part of my job and I take that very seriously. But I don’t have anything to hide, and I’m not concerned with what people think.

When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

I always was a rich person because money’s not related to happiness.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what’s evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We’re less sure about what is good. There’s sort of good, good enough, could be better – but absolute good is a little harder to define.

A pessimist? That’s a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

My parents weren’t actors or studio executives.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.

The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.

Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby.

My childhood was endless – from eight to 18 felt like hundreds of years.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

It’s a lot easier to stay idealistic if you don’t sign two to five next-of-kin letters every day.

When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, ‚One of these days I’m going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.‘ That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

I guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

I grew up as this very carefree, happy kid then things turned darker for me. Maybe it was because I saw that the world wasn’t as happy a place as I had hoped it would be for me.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.